The Game with Alex Hormozi - When People "Only Care About Making Money" | Ep 205

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

It's worse to lie than tell the truth about your intent. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about why being upfront with your intentions is much better especially when it comes to the topic of making money, dealing with negotiations, how saying no is oftentimes the right decision, and how you shouldn’t trust those who say “I don’t care about the money”.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:23) - People care about money: ruthless, honest, profit-driven.(2:40) - Red flag: when someone claims not to care about money.(4:31) - Book: 3 types of people - money, relationship, both.(5:54) - Success: saying no, learning from mistakes.(7:35) - Transparent negotiations, get other person to talk first.(11:37) - Business is like a marriage: clear intentions, dynamic.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

They're ruthless, they're clear, that's what they want. And the book describes those people as the best people to do business with. Why? Because there's no deception. Welcome to the Jim Secrets podcast where you talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons that we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. Good morning, everyone. Happy Wednesday. I hope you guys are having a great and phenomenal start to your Wednesday. I wanted to make this for you because this is something that came up on my mind. And so the title of this is when people only care about making money.

One of the things, it happened recently, someone was telling me about a friend of others like, yeah, I want to introduce you this guy, but honestly, like, he's just the type of guy that just cares about making money. And they were saying it really negatively. And I judged my own perception of what this person was saying to me, and I felt relief. because in my experience, and there's a book about this, I can't remember what the name of it is, I think it's winning through intimidation.

I think that's what it is. Or it's, I think that's what it is. But there's basically a book, if you know what it is. It talks about three types of people to do deals with. And there's the first person that talks about how they're like, I want to take your chips. I'm going to try and make as much money off of you as seemingly possible as category number one.

They're ruthless. They're clear. That's what they want. And the book describes those people as the best people to do business with. Why? Because there's no deception. And so one of the things that I feel like I've picked up over the last, I guess, eight, nine, ten years, whatever it is that we've been doing this is everyone is trying to make money. Some people are just honest about it. And I can't tell you. I know this will probably piss some people off. And that's okay. Because one of the biggest issues that I can see that people encounter are when they're it's it's worse to be it's worse to lie than it is to tell the truth about your intent like I guess that's the big point is that most people don't actually have altruistic intentions most people are here to make a profit and as long as they are providing value to their customers they ethically feel okay about it right like if we would just be like a hundred percent real cut this shit for a second right And I like to pronounce loud and clear to my community like, I'm here to make money, right? I am.

I'm here to provide value and get money in exchange for that. That's why I do this, right? It's why I'm not a nonprofit. And you can even get into how much CEOs of nonprofits make and I've seen all sorts of shady shit there. But the whole point is, whenever, this is the biggest warning sign I can give you of people to do deals with is when someone's like, I don't care. I don't care about the money. Boom, red flag. When someone says that, bullshit.

Everyone cares about the money. It's all they care about most of the times. And the people who lie about it are the ones that you need to be the most, I don't know, afraid is the right word, careful with. All right? My favorite people to deal with in the entire world are like, I'm here to make money. And I'm like, awesome. Now we can both just cut to the chase and talk about what matters to us.

And honestly, I've had some of the most pleasant business dealings with people who are open and up front. about that's what they want to do. Because then it's like, cool, this is what you get, this is what I get, let's go back and forth and find a way that we can both make money, right? And most of the times people who operate from that space obviously know that in order to make money, you have to provide value and take care of your customers.

But when people talk about it backwards and start talking about this altruistic, like, I'm only here to help people. You know, like, we have to do this and this and this. It's just like, I have seen this movie so many times, and I've seen this record play out. And I can't tell you, every business deal that I would say has, I'm trying to think, virtually every business deal that I've done,

and I've done a lot of them, have ended poorly with the people who started with their values. Now, you need to have aligned value, like aligned mission, and you need to have values that are in place. The thing is, when someone talks only about their values, most of the time your values are not actually aligned. And that's what I've found is that type of person in general tends to lie. Right? And maybe they're lying to themselves. I don't know, but that's like deeper other shit.

But the point is, in the book that I'm referencing, God, I can't remember what the name is. But he talks about three types of people. The first one is like that sharp, right? He's just like, I'm here for the money. I'm going to try and take as many chips from you as I possibly can. And that's how this works, right? Those guys are the best people to do business with because there's honesty up front. There's the second type of person who's like, I don't care about the money. Like, it's really about, you know, doing good and all that stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Those guys will screw you, all right? The third category is the type of person who's like, listen, you know what, I just value our relationship above everything else.

Like, whether we make this work or not is like for me, it's really about our relationship and making sure that we make this into something long term. Boom, another our flag. all right every time and i've heard each of those phrases in different instances and you've probably heard them too but maybe you haven't had the pattern recognition which is why i'm so big on this stuff and hopefully these podcasts provide some value for you because sometimes the best deals the deals not made right like Warren buffets first rule don't lose money second rule don't forget number one right never lose money a lot of times uh and i think there was another quote i just read by him recently where it's the people who are super advanced just to get extremely good at saying no,

right? Imagine how many deals he gets presented with on a regular basis, and he has to say no to 99% of them. Can you, when presented with 100 opportunities, say no 99 times, most people don't have that discipline, right? And the thing that separates the people who are really good from the people who are not as good is the number of mistakes they make and the gravity of the mistakes that they make, right? Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime business partner says, you never want to bet the farm, right? You always want to make, you want to make bets, but they want to be controlled bets that if you're wrong, you still can get it back. And I can tell you the amount of times that I've seen people, especially newer in business, who bet the whole farm on a relationship,

and when they get super romanticized, super excited about it, they're like, oh, this person just loves what I love. And like, no, we would never have any issues. Like, we just get along so, well, boom, red flag, right? I think sometimes the best deals are with people that you don't necessarily even like that much, but you're clear. And sometimes not liking someone, like on a personal level, not disliking them, being like, you know, we both are a little different, but, you know, we've come to both provide value to this relationship, right, in an economic sense, money-wise.

Sometimes my best relationship from business standpoint, I've been people like that because everyone's clear. Hey, guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called $100 million offers that over 8,000 five-star reviews and it has almost a perfect sport. You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand, hours into writing that book and it's my biggest gift to our community so it's my very

shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars to that later on in your business career I can potentially partner with you so that's my give go check it out Amazon and back to the show and I think that's like that's the underlying like notion that I found is there just has to be absolute blunt transparency and so a lot of times when I'll enter like negotiation things like that it's like this is what I want for this like if we can't get there that's not a big deal for me I just want to be very upfront this is what I want right and so now mind you in negotiations you want to get the other person's talk first because you can understand what they're

doing but but like you should be clear in your intentions when you're going into it and sugar-coating and saying like I'm here for the puppies and the rainbows and all that stuff and I'm just here for for our long term and I just want I always want to put our relationship first I cannot tell you how many times have been stabbed in the back with that saying cannot tell you, cannot tell you the amount of times that I've been stabbed and fucked because of that. All right. And so if the ultimate goal of the entrepreneur is to learn pattern recognition and be able to make better decisions,

because the only thing that separates you now from you five years ago is your beliefs and your ability to make decisions, right? Obviously you have skills and discipline and whatnot that's come with that. But all of that goes into how well you can make decisions, right? Warren Buffett starts over tomorrow, Bill Gates starts over tomorrow, whoever it is, whoever your guy is. If they start over tomorrow, they're able to recreate everything because they understand the pattern of decision making that they got them to where they were. And so if you can install that pattern, like humans are the only people on Earth that don't have to learn by doing. We can learn by watching other people do and learn from them. It speeds up your curve of moving up the ladder, right?

You can learn from other people's mistakes. You can learn from those people's principles. And so sometimes the best deals are the ones not made. And so I just want to give you just a few red flags that hopefully will help you avoid massive destruction in your life. So one, if someone presents someone else negatively as this guy only cares about money, I would be more worried about the person who says that than I would be about the person who supposedly was claimed to only care about money. When you enter the relationship, be abundantly clear about where the money is. all right it's business and so just don't mistake it for anything else everything else is just is just superfluous everything else is smoke and mirrors all right is bullshit get down to the bottom line of like

what's in it for you what's in it for me all right obviously we have to provide value right to one another in order for this to work but just like just cut all the extra fluff out and I can tell you the people who are rub wrong by that good riddance all right they're not the type of people you want to deal with and if they really are the super super super altruistic people some of the absolute worst people to do business with if they really really do believe all that stuff absolute worst why they're super emotional they're incredibly reactive just in my experience and this is obviously sweeping generalization but like you can probably recognize that personality type and that's why i don't do well with certain audiences right the people who are super

like crunchy, you know, granola-e type people are just rubbed really wrong by me. And that's okay because it's never going to work out because we just have such different ways of doing things. But those types of people tend to be overly emotional in their decision-making processes. And then they also are really, really difficult to deal with an ongoing basis when you're coming together. So big steps back. brutal honesty about who who's making what and what your intentions are with money being first okay

second be extremely extremely weary uh big red flags when someone says that they want to just value your relationship you and them more than anything else big red flag if they say they don't care about the money they're really just in this for the goodness bullshit big red flag right um and then uh and then between all of this stuff uh uh like you're like man Alex how do you how do you make good deals think about business deals a lot of times like marriages right um and i think if you think about like that it's like man that means like i a lot like most of them work out yeah because that's kind of like dating right it's very it's very difficult to create sustained long term um deals because businesses change markets change etc um

constantly right and so uh just most times saying no is the right call um And if you do see someone who starts talking about money, talking about money first, I would encourage you to peel back some of the societal given beliefs about what that says and be grateful that the person is being honest. And then you can have clear expectations and outcomes from one another. And a lot of times some of our best business relationships and deals have come from those types of situations. So I hope that provided value for you. Hopefully that will get you to say no to somebody who said that stuff. And then finally that type of person is the super super, super altruistic person. They should just stay in the nonprofit world and not get into the business world because

they're just, in my experience, way too emotional in general and just very difficult to deal with on an ongoing basis.